Shockvertising: a poke in the brain

“Here's a dead dog, give me my award” is how one advertising creative characterized the inclination of advertising festival juries to give high accolades to scandalously shocking ads. If advertising were a sport, its extreme version would be “shockvertising”-ads designed to cause controversy, whether by showing kids having their foreheads tattooed with a company logo or using the death row inmates to sell sweaters, to mention just a few of well-known examples.

The ever-growing stream of advertising messages is suffering from a highly contagious malaise: dumping the most controversial images of the moment into our consciousness. The volume of press coverage about shocking ads suggests that there are more than ever before, but it is not clear whether it is the number of ads or their prominence in mainstream media that is the problem.

Ads today need to scream so shrilly because we are more over-communicated to than ever before. As Richard Saul Wurman points out in his book Information Anxiety, just one Sunday edition of a newspaper like the New York Times-with all its supplements, reviews and magazines-contains more information that an average 17th century person could have accumulated during his or her entire lifetime. According to a media mogul Barry Diller, archivists estimate that the collective sum of all printed knowledge is doubling every four years, and more information has been produced in the last thirty years than in the last five thousand.¹

Technological changes fire up this trend. The UK now has almost forty times the number of TV channels than two decades ago. The same holds for the United States, indeed even more so. Add radio and international channels, and we are talking about the true “500 channel universe.” To top it all off, we have the Internet and our beloved cell phones; two billion SMS messages fly around the UK every month.

Advertising has saturated these communications venues. Every conceivable free space, from scaffolding covers to banana peels, is sooner or later dedicated to transmitting commercial messages. Even cows, as one shrewd farmer from the Midlands in Britain realized several years ago, provide ample space for promotions when he dressed them up in signs as they were grazing on a field near one of the busiest train routes in the country. The figures vary, but it is estimated that someone who lives in London or New York is surrounded by more than a thousand advertising messages every day. Some research sources multiply that figure manifold.

And there is one even more important factor. The media environment in the last decade has become tolerant of much stronger and controversial content. New television formats (especially the advent of “reality TV”), the obsession with celebrity culture, the behaviour of celebrities themselves, computer games, closely covered wars and crime chronicles all make our world less, not more prudish. The taboos of old are quaint today.

Advertising agencies are frantically exploiting all these trends. They use shock to play the media for some extra publicity, exponentially multiplying the value of campaigns, even if they receive negative publicity, including threats of boycotts. According to their own figures, the provocative FCUK (French Connection UK) campaign has so far brought about four million pounds in PR value, while simultaneously reinvigorating and strengthening the brand. They were able to get away with this because they managed to stay on the good side of what their audiences consider clever and amusing sexual innuendos in advertising. They simply knew the people they were talking to, supported by the generous serving of self-irony (as epitomized in their FCUK Advertising T-shirt).

`Some agencies do get carried away. They let their creatives use shock gratuitously as a replacement for smart and sophisticated creativity. Unrestrained culture prevails in some creative departments: full of adrenaline-charged young people who are keen to make their mark quickly and trained to push the standards of taste and propriety. Jack Fund, a distinguished creative director from California, talks about an example where “a student once sent me a spec campaign for mattresses featuring a boy in a coma. I suggested that he bring the campaign to an intensive care unit at a local hospital and ask family and staff members if they thought it was funny.” Ads for the travel club 18:30, catering to a younger audience, constantly ruffle feathers of regulators in the UK and are frequently banned from various media. At the same time-and just because of it-18:30 has contributed to the brand's success because their audience could relate to them.

Does shock work at all? The answer depends on how it is used. Marylin Baxter, the chairman of Hall & Partners, a brand and communications research consultancy in London, doesn't like shock ads personally, but thinks they could have strategic justification. “If it is strategically sound to use it-like if you are radically re-positioning the brand-it may be important to shock people from what they are thinking now into thinking something else,” she says. “It is a very contemporary way of doing advertising and something that agencies like HHCL or St. Luke's are good at. They try to make people's heads turn and start what they call 'a dialogue'.” A good example is HHCL's series of ads for Tango soft drink, featuring the infamous “orange man” harassing and slapping people on the street. Ads have caused a lot of controversy and even bans (for fears that they can encourage school bullying), but the effect on product sales was phenomenal.

Then there is the ever popular, so-called “issue advertising” for organizations like Amnesty International, or situations when the intrinsic subject of advertising is shocking, like RSPCA ads, which use shock as a weapon against complacency. Another British charity-Barnardos-regularly uses hard-hitting ads for the very reason that topics it supports-child and young persons abuse-are difficult to be talked about in any other way.

With the threshold for shock ever changing, what is waiting for us in the future: more or less shocking ads? Opinions are split. Media watchdogs, such as British-based Media Watch, tend to paint a bleak picture, using ever-present (and ever-stronger) commercial pressures as a sign that the media codes will become more relaxed and more inclined to appease big and financially powerful clients. Advertising agencies mostly advise against exploiting shock, especially in its gratuitous form, realizing that this is the best way to give the opponents of advertising a stick to beat them with. Maybe the most potent reason why shock is not going to prevail is articulated by Jack Fund: “Money. If shock ads sold more products to more consumers you'd see more of them. But they don't. For the most part, shock ads exclude more people than they include, speaking to smaller slices of the population rather than the masses.”

For every successful shock campaign like Outpost.com, Nike's 'Scars' or Club 18:30's saucy posters, there is even more disasters like Benetton's “death row” campaign, Ford Ka's “headless cat” or Calvin Klein's use of underage models in provocative poses. Shocking advertising will always have a dual character: an “organic” form and a “genetically modified” form. While the organic form is articulated from a strong topic or issue that needs to be projected and talked about, the “genetically modified” form is an artificial, reckless and, basically, selfish approach, cynically concocted purely for the reason of getting publicity and with only loose connection to the product or service being advertised. Despite the optimism (and given the direction that the world is going in), it seems that we haven't yet seen the end of shocking ads. There are new barriers of grossness to be broken, and it is just a matter of time before that happens. Before rushing into it, every smart advertising creative should always keep in mind the wise words of Patrick Collister, ex-executive creative director of Ogilvy & Mather: “You can come to the party with your private parts hanging out of your trousers and everybody will remember you. But, will they invite you again?”

Notes
1. Diller as quoted in Todd Oppenheimer's essay “Reality Bytes”